2010.05.19: When Peace Corps trainee Jennie Wysong earned her wings last week, the milestone was marked not by a Capraesque ringing bell, but the exuberant beat of the Pulaar drummers from the Senegal River Valley

When Peace Corps trainee Jennie Wysong earned her wings last week, the milestone was marked not by a Capraesque ringing bell, but the exuberant beat of the Pulaar drummers from the Senegal River Valley

Ms. Wysong's two-year assignment is in the village of Sambande in the Kaolack region where she will be living in a private hut in the village chief's extended family compound. Her hut has no electricity or running water, and the latrine outside is "a hole in the ground with a fence around it," she said. The lack of modern conveniences, however, has not dampened her enthusiasm for the task ahead. "I love my site and the Kaolack region," she said. And while building latrines, planting gardens and working with local schoolteachers on educational programs will be hard work, she says she'll make time for recreation as well. An avid rock-climber, Ms. Wysong enjoys scaling the massive baobab trees with the local boys who hunt for lizards inside the baobab's hollow girth. These barrel-shaped trees, often hundreds of years old, can grow 65 feet tall and wide. Several weeks ago, while still a trainee, she made a visit by donkey cart to Sambande for what she thought would be a quick meet-and-greet with her next host family. But one of her new "sisters" had other ideas. The girl, whom she guessed to be about 15, took her to visit each room in every family's compound in Sambande until she had met all 497 people who live in the village. "It took about two hours to walk to every house and greet everyone," Ms. Wysong said. "Greetings are very important in Senegalese culture, and it's not something you can rush. You have to ask how they are, how they slept, how their family is, how they are doing with the heat, etcetera."

When Peace Corps trainee Jennie Wysong earned her wings last week, the milestone was marked not by a Capraesque ringing bell, but the exuberant beat of the Pulaar drummers from the Senegal River Valley.

"I passed!" the 23-year-old New Egypt woman wrote excitedly in an e-mail May 12 from Ngoudiane, Senegal, after getting her results on the final language test needed to become a full-fledged Peace Corps volunteer.

"I swear-in on Friday in Dakar, and then it's off to two years of adventure," she said.

The language test was the culmination of her nine weeks of Peace Corps training during which she lived with a host family in Ngoudiane. There she learned to navigate a new culture and language and handle the unfamiliar with humor and aplomb, including 128-degree heat, stinging ants and palm-size spiders.

More than three dozen young Americans, all decked out in bright Senegalese traditional dress, joined Ms. Wysong in taking the official oath of office at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Dakar on May 14. The newly minted Peace Corps volunteers soon will be fanning out across Senegal, a western African nation about the size of South Dakota, to work on a variety of tasks - particularly environmental education projects aimed at helping the people in remote villages.

Ms. Wysong's two-year assignment is in the village of Sambande in the Kaolack region where she will be living in a private hut in the village chief's extended family compound. Her hut has no electricity or running water, and the latrine outside is "a hole in the ground with a fence around it," she said. The lack of modern conveniences, however, has not dampened her enthusiasm for the task ahead.

"I love my site and the Kaolack region," she said.

And while building latrines, planting gardens and working with local schoolteachers on educational programs will be hard work, she says she'll make time for recreation as well. An avid rock-climber, Ms. Wysong enjoys scaling the massive baobab trees with the local boys who hunt for lizards inside the baobab's hollow girth. These barrel-shaped trees, often hundreds of years old, can grow 65 feet tall and wide.

Several weeks ago, while still a trainee, she made a visit by donkey cart to Sambande for what she thought would be a quick meet-and-greet with her next host family. But one of her new "sisters" had other ideas. The girl, whom she guessed to be about 15, took her to visit each room in every family's compound in Sambande until she had met all 497 people who live in the village.

"It took about two hours to walk to every house and greet everyone," Ms. Wysong said. "Greetings are very important in Senegalese culture, and it's not something you can rush. You have to ask how they are, how they slept, how their family is, how they are doing with the heat, etcetera."

As a trainee, Ms. Wysong lived in Ngoudiane with the 42 members of the extended Ngom family. Inside the compound of flat cement buildings, she woke daily to what she calls the music of Africa - birds scrambling on the tin roof, babies crying, the sounds of women pounding millet and the whinnying of a horse directly outside her window.

The family gave her the name Koura Ngom, and as is Senegalese custom, she refers to them using familial forms of address, such as mother, sister and aunt. With 42 people in the family, learning everyone's real name would have been overwhelming anyway, at least in the beginning, she said.

The Ngom family taught her the Senegalese technique for eating meals out of a communal bowl using only her right hand. In Senegalese culture, people do not use forks, knives or spoons, she said, and since the left hand is the "toilet hand," it is never used for eating.

"Eating rice and sauce with your hand takes some getting used to, and I was pretty hungry for the first few weeks because I would end up with more food in my lap than in my mouth," Ms. Wysong recalled.

At Peace Corps training sessions with the other Americans, she learned skills she'll need when she gets to work in Sambande, such as how to build the more efficient mud stoves that cut down on wood consumption. Deforestation is a major problem in many villages, she said. The training sessions also taught the Americans how to build latrines and make mosquito repellant from the leaves of the neem tree to protect against mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria.

Ms. Wysong says one of her toughest challenges while living with her host family in Ngoudiane was trying to learn the Seereer language without benefit of a dictionary or textbook.

"Unfortunately, Seereer isn't really a written language so no such resources exist," Ms. Wysong said. "In fact, if you ask three different people to write down a word, you will get three completely different spellings."

The Peace Corps provided the trainees with a language book, written partially in French, but she found she still was getting tripped up by the myriad ways of conjugating verbs in the Seereer language. So she made a large chart on a long sheet of brown packing paper and taped it to the wall in her room to help her study. (Grammarphobes take note: There are eight ways to conjugate verbs in the present tense in the Seereer language, nine in the past tense and six in the future tense so this was one long roll of paper up on the wall, she said).

The charts and homemade flashcards paid off, and she was able to pass her foreign language test last week, scoring "intermediate-mid" after only nine weeks of exposure to the language in Senegal. "I've still got a long way to go on the road to fluency, but I'm excited to leave the nest and start testing my wings," Ms. Wysong said.

The news that most of the people in her new village, Sambande, speak Wolof, not Seereer, doesn't discourage her. As someone who sees the proverbial glass as half-full, she figures she'll learn Wolof quickly, too.

Ms. Wysong, a 2005 graduate of New Egypt High School whose parents, Michael and Patty, still live on Holly Hill Drive, always has had a bit of wanderlust.

While at Longwood University in Farmville, Virgina, she took advantage of the study-abroad programs to spend time in Niger and Chile. Ms. Wysong said she began in the application process for the Peace Corps in her senior year and received her invitation to Senegal in 2009.

"I joined the Peace Corps because I wanted to give back to the global community, and I think the Peace Corps has the most sustainable model for development of any organization," she said.

Ms. Wysong posts photographs and writes about her Senegal experiences in her online Web blog called "Ordinary Adventures." It can be found on the Internet at www.blogger.com/profile/12909812146252253127.

Memo to Incoming Director WilliamsPCOL has asked five prominent RPCVs and Staff to write a memo on the most important issues facing the Peace Corps today. Issues raised include the independence of the Peace Corps, political appointments at the agency, revitalizing the five-year rule, lowering the ET rate, empowering volunteers, removing financial barriers to service, increasing the agency's budget, reducing costs, and making the Peace Corps bureaucracy more efficient and responsive. Latest: Greetings from Director Williams

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